


Almost Like Living

by smolassassinchildx (smolassassinchild)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-23
Updated: 2009-10-23
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolassassinchild/pseuds/smolassassinchildx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lee comes to Kara's apartment looking for comfort in the days after Zak's funeral.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almost Like Living

Kara first discovered paint when she was four. Not the stuff itself, but what it could do. She’d been woken in the middle of the night by her parents—all heated voices and words she didn’t know—and it burned, boiled inside of her until she thought she might just burst. Afraid to leave her room, she took out her watercolor set and paper and poured it all into the colors—smearing broad strokes across the page, messy and muted until the shouting was gone and she felt at peace again. Content, she crawled back under the covers and fell asleep. From that day on, whenever the world became too much for her to bear, she’d retreat with her paints and pour out her soul until she felt solid again. Later, when she was older, she discovered booze and sex could get the job done for a while, but they were still no replacement for a paintbrush.

Which leaves her now, standing before her canvas—blank and white and glaring back at her for days. She has paint caking on her skin, spattered across the oversized white button-down she uses for a smock, pooling at her feet on her drop cloth, but not a single stroke or handprint has made it onto the canvas. No relief. But maybe relief isn’t hers, not now, not when it’s her own damned fault she’s standing here alone.

Perhaps the only part of her that belongs on the canvas is herself—blood, guts, tears, and penance. Open herself up and pour herself out. The idea screams in her ears, loud and buzzing, and it’s no surprise she doesn’t hear the knock at the front door, or the way it swings open, unlocked. She hears nothing until that voice and she thinks she might just throw up if there was anything in her system.

“Like what you’ve done with the place.” There’s no bite in his sarcasm, but she pretends there is. It’s easier if she pretends, easier if she doesn’t look at him.

“You don’t belong here, Lee.”

He doesn’t shout—doesn’t fight—just says, “Kara,” so soft and so tired that it hits something in her. The same something that hit her the moment she first saw him, and the same something she’s pushed aside so long she’s grown accustomed to living with it buried inside her. When she turns to look at him, he looks like Hades on a cracker. His hair disheveled, unwashed and greasy. Dark circles rim his eyes, dull now, lacking their usual brightness. His cheeks are drawn and scratched with stubble, and he smells like stale beer. His clothes looks like he picked them up off the floor, but she can’t say any different about herself.

Gods, he’s actually come to her for _comfort_ and she almost laughs. The smart thing would be to send him running now. Away. There’s nothing she can do for him. Maybe if she’d gotten any sleep her tongue might actually be working, but it clearly isn’t because she asks, “Have you eaten anything?”

“No.”

Wordlessly, she retreats to the kitchen and returns moments later. “Sit,” she commands, pointing to the couch. He does and she rewards him with the paper plate she’s holding. “Eat.”

“It’s bread,” he says studying the contents. “Stale bread.”

“And there are starving children on Saggitaron. Now eat, you look like you’re about to keel over.”

“What about you?” he mutters. “You look like you haven’t slept all week.” But he eats and something that feels like happiness flutters through her. It’s gone as quickly as it came.

“I’m getting by,” she says turning to her canvas. “I just need to finish this first.”

Lee’s eyes fall on the blankness. “Finish? Did you even start?”

“Why are you even here, Lee?” she snaps just to have something to say.

He hangs his head. “I don’t know. I just needed to get out for a while.”

“And you just ended up here?”

He looks up at her, doesn’t answer her. “You’ve got something…” he motions to her cheek and she gropes blindly for a moment before he waves her over. “Just come here.” He reaches up, peeling a dried fleck of blue paint from underneath her eye. “I guess I just wanted some company, get out of my own head for a little while.”

Kara slides down beside him on the couch, and it’s the closest thing she’s felt to something other than empty in what feels like forever—even though it’s only really been a matter of days. His hand falls on her bare knee and a shiver shudders through her. Connection. She feels grounded, like she’s coming out of free fall, and she lets her shoulder rest against his.

“I miss him, too,” she says in a voice she doesn’t recognize as her own by the way it cracks. He leans some weight against her and he’s warm and solid by her side; she feels heat rising in her face, and unbuttons her smock to cool herself off. Lee’s eyes follow her hands and she sees the recognition in them when the t-shirt beneath is revealed. She glances down at herself, running her fingers over the fabric, remembering other times she’s curled this shirt in her hands. “It stopped smelling like him yesterday,” she barely whispers.

And suddenly something between them breaks. She isn’t sure whether she kissed him or he kissed her but his mouth is on hers, tongue sliding between her lips. She licks back at him, arms tangling around his neck and drawing him closer, because for the first time in nearly a week she feels her heart pounding in her chest, feels warm under Lee’s touch. Lungs demand oxygen when his lips break from hers, trailing along her jaw and neck. She tangles her fingers in his hair, gasps as his hands gather her shirt and push it up over her head in one fluid movement. She’s bare beneath him now, save for her briefs.

It’s wrong, so wrong but there’s blood rushing in her veins and there’s a glimmer in his eyes again and maybe, just maybe. She grabs at his shirt, tearing it off him and he descends on her again, lips and tongue and teeth igniting fires inside her. A sharp ache flares where he grinds his hips into hers, hardness pressing against her though the fabric of his pants and she moans into his mouth.

His hand slips down her body, slides under her briefs, fingers finding her hot and wet, and gently stroking at her entrance and she feels, gods she _feels_, and it’s selfish but she wants more. “Please, Lee,” she groans and his hand slides away, working furiously to free himself, kicking his jeans down to his knees and she skips a precious breath in anticipation.

When he slides into her, she forgets for a moment that she’s most definitely going to Hades, but it doesn’t matter because right now she is alive. She locks her legs around him, trying to draw him deeper, trying desperately not to lose this feeling, this connection. She claws at his back, as their hips rock together and against each other.

Her breath catches as he changes the tempo, like he can’t make up his mind. Like he can’t make himself go slow and steady because it’s not his place, but doesn’t want it to end either and she can’t blame him. She pulls his head down to hers, and when she feels his heart pounding furiously in his chest, beating against her own, she steals a too gentle kiss from his lips and he closes his eyes.

Lee buries his face against her neck, stubble scratching against her shoulder. She feels dampness by her ear, but doesn’t think much of it. She doesn’t think much of anything as he drives into her again and again, harder, faster now—each thrust adding to the heat coiled tight in her belly and, gods, she doesn’t ever want him to stop. She holds on for as long as she can before the world comes apart around her, gasping again when he rocks into her once, twice more and release shudders through him.

Her breathing slowly starts to return to normal. His doesn’t. His face remains buried against her neck, still lying half on top of her, and he is trembling in her arms. Her brow furrows, and she shoves aside the tears that are prickling the corners of her own eyes. She drops her forehead against his shoulder, runs one hand over his back and holds him against her, and realizes once his breathing has calmed that he’s cried himself to sleep. She shifts underneath him and shuts her eyes, letting the sound of his even breathing lull her to sleep.

She wakes the next morning to the sound of the door opening, and finds she’s still sprawled across the couch with her smock draped across her torso. She looks up to see Lee standing above her with two cups of coffee and a paper bag. “I thought,” he says, descending the stairs, “I’d make some breakfast, but you didn’t have anything in the kitchen so I went out to get something.”

“Thanks.” She sits up, pulling the oversized shirt on, sliding the buttons in to place. Lee averts his eyes until she’s decent, and she thinks he might actually be blushing. She lets out a laugh and he turns to her.

“What?” he asks.

She just shakes her head and accepts the paper to-go mug he hands her. “Nothing.” She watches as he uncrumples the bag and sets a breakfast sandwich on the coffee table in front of her. Her head spins a little bit because it’s so much like her first morning with Zak. It hadn’t been their first night together, because they’d started out _just_ frakking (nothing more, because she couldn’t be developing actual feelings for her student, -- not for anyone, but especially not her student). Then one night she finally relented to his almost incessant pleas and let him crash with her until morning. She woke up to breakfast and him smiling at her like a dumb, grateful puppy, and she couldn’t help but grin and drag him back into bed. Raising her mug to her lips, she realizes the memory doesn’t sting as much as it should—it should eat her alive—and she chokes a little on her coffee.

“Are you alright?” he asks.

“Yeah, fine.” She looks down at where she spluttered the coffee down her shirtfront. She drabs at it with her sleeve until the hot liquid becomes one cool, brown stain across her chest.

Heaving a sigh, she sets the mug down and picks up the sandwich because her stomach is screaming at her, reminding her she never actually ate anything yesterday. They eat in silence, until Lee finally puts down his food and looks at her.

“Thank you.” He clears his throat. “I, um… last night, I… I really needed…”

She lets him off the hook. “Me too.” And it hits her that she doesn’t want to know where this is going, so she says, “Let’s not make a big deal out of it.”

Lee picks up his coffee again and stares at the steam rising from the hole in the lid. “Right.” She can’t tell if he sounds relieved or not, but he changes the subject and stays with her. They sit on the couch and talk about meaningless things that almost have them smiling for the rest of the morning, and around noon she lets him use her shower while she gets dressed.

By the time Lee’s clean and looking human again, she’s sitting on her bed looking at the piles of Zak around the room: her shirts mixed in with his jeans wherever they just happened to fall, his textbooks on her nightstand, his deodorant lying uncapped and on its side on the dresser—stupid and messy and she always had to pick up after him, but now she can’t exactly bear to touch any of it. Lee leans against the doorway. “Are you going to need help? Packing his stuff up?”

“I’ll get to it later,” she says, pushing herself to her feet and brushing past him as she walks out into the living room. “What are you going to do now, Lee?”

He digs his hands into his pockets, shrugs his shoulders. “Not sure. I have a couple more weeks before my next drill weekend.”

“Benefits of being in the reserves.” Kara shakes her head. “Lazy bum.” It actually gets him to laugh, and, gods, they have the exact same laugh and all of a sudden she can’t really breathe. “So what, you just planning to hang around here?” He shrugs again and smiles and the idea doesn’t seem so bad. And suddenly she knows this needs to stop. Everything needs to stop. Every minute he’s here is a minute he’s with his brother’s murderer and she has no right to feel so happy to have him near. She clears her throat and looks away. “Well, my leave days are running out, so—”

“Oh, are you going back to your classes?”

“No, I quit.” She says, almost too abruptly. “Actually, your dad offered me a position on _Galactica_ and I—”

“He what?” Everything about Lee’s demeanor hardens, a fierceness burns in his eyes and his hands are clenched at his sides. “Kara, you can’t seriously be thinking about serving under him.”

“Why the hell not, Lee?” She folds her arms across her chest, stance wide.

“_Because it’s his frakking fault that Zak is dead!_”

Lee’s raised voice sends ice rushing in her veins, it’s a rant he’s clearly been holding in for too long, but she can’t even really make out the words because the idea has hit her. This is it. This will make everything stop.

“_—should have never been in that plane in the first place and—_”

“Get out.”

“What?”

“I said _get out_, Lee.”

He throws his hands in the air. “I can’t believe this. You’re siding with the man who got your fiancé killed.”

“You make it sound like your old man put a gun to his head and fired!”

“Well, he might as well have!” Lee’s face goes dark and dangerous. “The way he went on and on about how a man wasn’t a man until he wore the wings of a viper pilot. Zak died trying to live up to Dad’s ridiculous expectations.”

Her lips are set in a straight line. “You’re going to play the moral high ground card? That’s pretty hilarious the day after you frakked your dead brother’s fiancée. Though maybe I should give you a little credit, you did wait until he was out of the way.”

And he’s gone—up the stairs and out of the apartment leaving nothing but the sound of a slamming door in his wake, and her with venom racing in her veins. She crosses the room to the empty canvas, grabs a brush and it comes in waves now, everything finally flowing out of her—pain and rage in broad strokes until nothing is white anymore.

It’s almost good. It almost feels like living.

 

\--End--


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